My tableview that used to smoothly reload the sections and rows is now slow when running on iOS 7. When I reload the whole tableview table is loaded instantaneously, but calling reloadRowsAtIndexPaths or reloadSections (with UITableViewRowAnimationNone) takes somewhere around a second to complete.
I'm not using AutoLayout for this section of the app yet. The cells are laid out in separate Xib files with the corresponding custom classes
Do you have auto layout enabled for your cell views? Are you reloading your table view when it is not visible (for instance, when a detail view controller is pushed)? This seems like a known bug. See this question/answer. Apple bug report: rdar://15175803
Basically, you have a multi tiered solution, which is not perfect but will give you satisfactory results. First, this is always true, optimize your constraints in the table view cell. If you have constraints modified dynamically, make sure you are not causing needless layouts and drawing. Second, do not update your table view if it is not visible. This feels like a hack, but there is no other option (well, there is one, but it involves disabling auto layout, which is not optimal at all, so let's ignore). You can test in your view controller if the tableView.window property is nil, which would indicate that the table view is hidden. If it is not hidden, update normally, but if it is, do not update. Just set a flag that the table was updated. On viewWillAppear: call reloadData to update the table. You can preserve selection by querying the table view for selected indexpaths and selecting them again after reloading the data.
